BASE has announced that it is the first operator in Belgium to trial LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) technology.
The country’s third-largest operator revealed that it had carried out tests of the technology in Hasselt in partnership with Chinese vendor ZTE using 2×20MHz Carrier Aggregation (CA).
“This is still a test phase, we clearly see the advantages for our customers: [these] LTE-A tests show data speeds over 250Mbps. For the customer, that means a 10 MB file is downloaded in less than one second, compared to 90 seconds 2.5 years ago,” said Suzanne Kelder CTO of BASE.
Europe is largely trailing Asia and North America in terms of 4G LTE rollouts and developments, including the implementation of LTE-A.
European operators who are trialing LTE-A include Telefónica Germany, which announced late last year it had hit speeds of 225MBps.
EE announced the launch of its own LTE-A network last autumn. The UK operator is continuing to trial the technology throughout 2014 and expects it to be used for the nascent ultra high-definition 4K television market.
Both Telefónica Germany and EE used carrier aggregation technology from Huawei.
Elsewhere, Telstra and Ericsson held what they described as the first commercial trial of LTE-A last summer.
A recent report from research house ABI Research showed that worldwide LTE-related subscriptions reached 229.7 million in 2013, and will continually grow at a CAGR of 43.6 percent between 2013 and 2019, to exceed 2 billion.
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Click here to read Mobile Europe’s Oct/Nov 2013 LTE Insight Report